Here is how to save a fortune in prescription drug costs. It DOES work.

[hunter]

18. My brother lives close enough to Mexico that he gets his meds there.

I'd feel a little more comfortable with Canadian pharmacies, but my brother has got few affordable options, even with Obamacare and manufacturer coupons.

As usual with our insurance, my wife and I pay many thousand dollars for meds until September or October and then everything is "free" until January.

But not really.

One of my drugs costs about $200 a month in the U.S.A..

From a Canadian mail order pharmacy it's $90, in Mexico it's $40.

It's too bad our U.S. congress is owned by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

I'm a socialist when it comes to medicine. I'd like to see new drugs developed in very well-funded university settings, and the results of this research released to the public domain so new lifesaving drugs could be manufactured by anyone, worldwide, in a well-regulated environment. Every lifesaving drug would be "generic."

I'd also like to see the most egregiously murderous owners of drug patents be subject to a corporate death penalty, their patents declared invalid, their corporate names and trademarks put to death, their shareholders left ragged and flapping in the wind. Martin Shkreli and EpiPen fiascoes would be put down with extreme prejudice. Conflating development and marketing costs would be a crime.

Private developers of new drugs could assured reasonable profits, but no more. They wouldn't allowed to hold people with serious health problems hostage.